Samsung Giorgio Armani Review

Camera interface

Camera:

Although the phone is not touted for its camera, it still comes with 3-megapixel unit with LED flash. It is activated in about 3-4 seconds, whether you start it from the shortcut button or from the icon in the main menu and uses a landscape-oriented interface. To the left of the display is a column with icons showing the current settings that you’re using to take pictures (resolution, white balance, ISO, etc), while to the right are the navigation and settings buttons. The latter button can be hid if you wish so - a function, indicated by the small arrow.

The camera biggest drawback is not the lack of autofocus but the fact that it is very slow! It needs 9 to 10 seconds pause to save a picture (at maximum quality) and prepare the interface to take another.

The images produced by it are with average quality – although there size (resolution) is big, they still are typical for a phone, with artificial colors, average detail and noise all over them. As always, once the light decreases, the quality gets even worse with more noise and blurred detail due to the noise-reduction system.



The camcorder can capture videos with up to CIF (352x288) resolution but there also is an option for QVGA (320x240) which is the most commonly used size in Internet sites.


Miltimedia:

The music player is a module that has been copied from the U700 Ultra phone and just optimized for the touch-sensitive display navigation. It sorts the multimedia files by: Last / All / Recently played / Artists / Albums / Genres / Composers / Playlists, similar to other music players of modern phones, like the Walkman of Sony Ericsson for example. The user can create playlists, add music from the memory to it and reorder the added tracks.

We were disappointed when a track was started and the now playing interface appeared: it has nothing in common to the one on the U700 and other recent Samsungs. In order to resemble the Croix (Cross) idea, the interface has the two lines (vertical and horizontal) which cross, occupying the whole screen. The position of the horizontal towards the vertical indicates the volume level while the opposite indicates the time progress. Rewinding and controlling of the volume is achieved by moving those lines across the screen and the play/pause is where they cross – in the “Croix point”.

Although the phone has 2.6" high-resolution display, the only information that is displayed is the track-file title, which scrolls in the top – we would have preferred to have separate rows for Artist, Album and Track information, as well as a large album art cover. The space of the interface isn’t utilized by any mean and the only options are hidden under two small buttons in the form of arrows, found in the upper left and bottom right corners. The first “opens” menu with a few of the next tracks (they are also shown by the file name) while the second has options for repeat, shuffle and rating.

The player, unlike the one in LG Prada, can be minimized and work in the background. The music keeps on playing but you can use the phone’s functionality, type a message, use the camera or browse the internet for example. In this mode, the homescreen will visualize the now playing song information at the place where calendar/clock is normally shown. Here we have a small Album Cover (if one is available) and this “window” is shortcut to the player, so tapping on it will bring it back in focus.

For music playback is used the same speaker as the one for during a call. It sounds very well but is too weak and you will hardly hear it in noisy environment. For personal listening to music, the stereo headphones from the box or Stereo Bluetooth ones should be used.

As in other Samsung phones, stand-alone Video player is missing from the main menu. However, such files can be played when you choose them from the file manager. A MPEG4/H.263 file in QVGA resolution played smoothly but some artefacts appeared. This is probably due to incapability of the phone to handle a file with such resolution/bitrate but is better option than lagging the image or not playing at all. H.264 files are not supported, so better use the H.263 codec.


Software:

The Armani phone comes preloaded with software for previewing of documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF). A complex Excel file opened (although taking almost a minute to load), however, the separate worksheets are shown as pages and once we tried to load the last one, the phone showed “out of memory” error and restarted. If you are planning to use it, avoid large documents. As other models of the brand, the phone doesn’t open Office 2007 documents.